National Geographic, Sesame Street could be the future of children's programming.

For all the advancements brought on by technology in the last 70 years or so, the core experience of watching a TV show has largely remained unchanged. Sure, now we can stream shows on demand and watch in beautiful high-definition, but at the basic level we're still just sitting and passively absorbing content that doesn't respond to our actions at all. While video games have allowed us new and exciting ways to interact with our on-screen images, TV shows themselves haven't really learned how to integrate interactivity into their programming (and no, asking viewers to tweet during a new episode of Grey's Anatomy doesn't count).

Microsoft is now doing its part to drag TV into a more interactive future with two new Kinect-powered TV shows: Kinect Nat Geo TV: America the Wild and Kinect Sesame Street: Season 1. Each show (labeled on the box as a "2-way TV experience") comes in a two-disc set including eight episodes. Nat Geo TV even includes a one-year pass to download additional episodes from Xbox Live.

I'm a little too old to be in the target audience for these shows myself (Nat Geo TV is rated E-10+ while Sesame Street is rated EC by the ESRB), so I borrowed some neighborhood children—11-year-old Shane, 9-year-old Maya, and 6-year-old Nina—to see what they thought of Microsoft's entry into the brave new world of Interactive TV.

Shutterbugs and sidetracks

We started our Sunday morning play session with a Nat Geo TV episode about grizzly bears. The episode started like any non-interactive National Geographic show, with the host using his pet grizzly bear to present entertaining and educational facts about the beasts, intercut with lovingly detailed nature shots of bears in their native environments. For the most part, the children sat through these sections with the glazed, mildly anesthetized look familiar to all zoned out TV watchers (though another episode about mountain lions generated lots of chatter about how cute the large kittens were).

Enlarge/ Nina (left) and Shane move their heads to eat some on-screen moths.

Nat Geo TV spices up the viewing experience in a couple of interactive ways. The first is occasional photo assignments that ask the viewers to shout "SNAP!" when they see a specific scene: a bear hovering over freshly killed meat, for instance. Our test subjects had a little trouble with this concept at first (the brief on-screen instructional overlays required a lot of quick reading comprehension to figure out), but after a little coaxing all three kids were eagerly shouting at the TV and trying to capture the best shots. These "photos" were displayed back to the kids later in the episode, alongside a Kinect-captured shot of whichever kid first called out for a photo (the hardware seems to use its directional microphone to crop and center the photo on the appropriate kid, which I thought was a nice touch).

The second interactive bit during the video portion of the show is called a Sidetrack, which the kids gleefully activated by calling out "TRACKS!" whenever a set of animated paw prints appeared on-screen. During this portion of the episode, the action pauses periodically to offer the viewers a binary question: are these claw marks on a tree a way for the bear to mark its territory or to groom itself? Is the bear we're looking at here a grizzly bear or a black bear? Should we head upwind or downwind to catch up to the bear without scaring it off?

Voting is as simple as raising your right or left hand to choose the option on the right or left side of the screen, a process the kids picked up on quite easily. The Kinect will register votes from every human shape in its viewing area, though, which led to some interesting stalemates when Shane and Maya disagreed about which answer to give (luckily, Nina was available to get up off the couch and break the tie, though Shane often tried gently overpowering her to force a vote in his direction). Correct answers earned points that help earn medals at the end of the show, while wrong answers earn an extremely gentle correction from the host before the episode continues on as normal.

Going wild

The most interactive (and most popular) portion of Nat Geo TV was the selection of "Go Wild!" mini-games that are inserted where the commercial breaks would be during a normal broadcast. These sections asked the kids to stand up and act out some of the wild animal behaviors they saw described earlier in the episode—digging up and eating moths in one game and swatting away angry hornets in another (a third game combined the two behaviors and let the children roar out loud to unleash a moth-eating frenzy). Other games we tried had the kids imitating a pouncing mountain lion or grabbing cubs by the scruff of their neck to get them back home.

Enlarge/ Maya (left) and Nina show off what they look like as bears (though Maya's bear head has temporarily disappeared) while Shane mimes in the background.

In an engaging bit of augmented reality, the live, on-screen images of the kids were enhanced in these games by a polygonal 3D animal mask and forearm coverings that gave them animated claws. The kids couldn't get enough of seeing themselves as wild animals, and the enhanced mirror effect did a good job of helping them get into character, so to speak. While the effect was a little jittery at times, the Kinect did an impressive job tracking the kids' movements and keeping up the cute on-screen illusion. The only time the Kinect really failed was when the over-eager kids advanced too close to the screen, prompting a large on-screen warning to urge them back into the correct range.

Multi-kid mayhem

A warning to families with more than two children—you may find yourself playing traffic cop during mini-game sections where the Kinect can only detect two players at once. In our testing, the child who was forced to sit out of a mini-game would often try to jump in front of his or her siblings, taking over control of the bear head and claws as the Kinect detected their skeleton. After some brief pushing and shoving, the odd kid out would usually pout loudly for a few seconds, before quickly bouncing back and contenting themselves with miming similar actions in the background, even if the Kinect wasn't actively tracking their motions.

The games aren't exactly what you'd call deep or overly strategic, but they do keep score and reward careful players with multipliers and medals at the end for strong performances. Regardless, the kids reveled in the opportunity to get up and flail about for 30 seconds or so at a stretch, choosing to replay each mini-game four or five times to improve their scores. After getting sufficiently tired out, the kids seemed to welcome the chance to sit down to more pre-filmed content, providing a necessary break that more Kinect-powered games should really integrate into the experience.

While the kids unanimously said the "Go Wild!" mini-games were the best part of Nat Geo TV, and that the filmed sections were just "OK," the well-balanced mixture of both types of content seemed to hold their interest quite well. Later in our testing, when the kids jumped directly into an ant-eating mini-game from the main menu, Shane still said he wanted to "watch the episode to see what the ants were about." And later on, the kids decided to launch an episode about mountain lions rather than just jumping directly to more mini-games, seemingly showing they found some value to the mix of filmed and interactive content.

Too old for Sesame Street

When Shane left momentarily for a music lesson, I convinced the two remaining girls to try out the Sesame Street disc we had on hand, though they were reluctant to give up on a mini-game that involved using their powerful bear claws to fight off wolves. The interactive bits were a little less engaging here. At pre-set times, the game asked the kids to make a throwing motion toward the screen, which activated pre-filmed sequences where a talking ball-shaped puppet might fly back to Elmo, or a coconut might get tossed into Grover's basket. During the show itself (a story about Elmo growing to humongous proportions thanks to a malfunctioning wish), the kids could point and call out "PICTURE!" every time a ruler appeared on-screen to take screenshots that were shown at the end.

The kids seemed easily bored by the simpler content and interactions here, which they both insisted they were too old and mature for. Nina, who just started first grade, said she thought it would be better for kids in pre-school, but I definitely caught her smiling and giggling a bit as she threw her coconuts to Grover (especially when one got caught in his mouth).

But Nat Geo TV was definitely a big hit with our test subjects. How big? When we finally had to pack up the Xbox and head back home so the kids could prepare for an afternoon birthday party, I heard Shane ask his mother at least three times if they could get an Xbox for themselves. If that's not a good review, I don't know what is.

I downloaded the sesame st one last week but haven't had time to try it out with my preschoolers. The download version has a trial episode before making you pay for all the episodes (and I think there's some differences between the disc and download versions.)

I wasn't interested in the Nat Geo one but I think my kids would love the minigames.

Not to start a "who's better" tangent, but stuff like this seems like a direct shot at Nintendo. I love my Kinect, even with no kids (seriously, just yelling at my tv to pause when I get a phone call or visitor is worth the price to me). But the level of interactivity here seems like it could hook kids early, the same way Nintendo used to.

If Microsoft made a mobile device that used WP8 without the actual phone bits, but with physical controls, and had these kind of apps for it, they'd likely be able to make a full-front assault on Nintendo (since the purchases could also be used on phones, something Nintendo does NOT have).

I second the Xbox for Ars Kid Reviewers - I'd give $5 for that. Techies can be generous where children are concerned (ChildsPlay comes to mind) – but better make sure Shanes mom actually wants him to have an Xbox. . .

Not to start a "who's better" tangent, but stuff like this seems like a direct shot at Nintendo. I love my Kinect, even with no kids (seriously, just yelling at my tv to pause when I get a phone call or visitor is worth the price to me).

Wait... what? If you have a Kinect xBox you can control the TV? Does this work if you have a Tivo, or just some standard DVR?

I don't own an xBox, but have been thinking about getting one as the Kinect already has the wife very intrigued (yes, we do have a large family room to handle all the flailing about.

Not to start a "who's better" tangent, but stuff like this seems like a direct shot at Nintendo. I love my Kinect, even with no kids (seriously, just yelling at my tv to pause when I get a phone call or visitor is worth the price to me).

Wait... what? If you have a Kinect xBox you can control the TV? Does this work if you have a Tivo, or just some standard DVR?

I don't own an xBox, but have been thinking about getting one as the Kinect already has the wife very intrigued (yes, we do have a large family room to handle all the flailing about.

A couple of cable providers, uh, Comcast and Verizon FIOS maybe?, let you use the 360 in place of your cable box. I'd guess that's where the Kinect integration comes in.

Not to start a "who's better" tangent, but stuff like this seems like a direct shot at Nintendo. I love my Kinect, even with no kids (seriously, just yelling at my tv to pause when I get a phone call or visitor is worth the price to me).

Wait... what? If you have a Kinect xBox you can control the TV? Does this work if you have a Tivo, or just some standard DVR?

I don't own an xBox, but have been thinking about getting one as the Kinect already has the wife very intrigued (yes, we do have a large family room to handle all the flailing about.

A couple of cable providers, uh, Comcast and Verizon FIOS maybe?, let you use the 360 in place of your cable box. I'd guess that's where the Kinect integration comes in.

I'm a cable-cutter (so all of TV comes in through the internet (ESPN, Hulu+, HBO Go, Netflix, Amazon Instant video, etc.)* The Kinect allows you to simply say "XBox pause", "XBox, next episode", et cetera, which makes watching stuff easier than using a remote, and lets you pause from a different room just by yelling. I don't have FiOS (they literally stopped running fiber one street over from mine), but I believe all the TV apps are also Kinect-ready, meaning you can pause live TV just by yelling at it.

Noow, there's still a lot of room for improvement in the service (switching apps is much faster with a remote, for instance). But it went from "oh, neat" to "I miss this when I watch stuff on my PS3" in about a week. I'd rather watch something on Netflix on the 360 than get the blu-ray and put it in my PS3. Like I said, it needs work, but you'd be surprised about how quickly the habit of controlling videos and music via voice command becomes ingrained.

*I do pay for HBO access for my father, and use his info to log into services that require a cable subscription. It's a bit of a cheat, but I'm still going out of my way to kick money into the pot, so I don't feel too much like a pirate.

Im sure the kids had fun and interest in the interactive shows.But you should have measured how much they actually learned from the shows and how much of an impact does the increased interactivity has on their learning as opposed to plain tv watching.Im sure many parents would appreciate this insight.

I know you can't really cover this in reviews, but I seriously wonder the staying power of this sort of thing. I KNOW my 4 year old would absolutely love this. (Even in "non-interactive" shows she still goes nuts when they tell her to crawl like a pig or whatever.)

Step 1- Is it fun? Looks like your review indicates a yes.Step 2- Will they still think it's fun after they've seen every episode? Still up for debate.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.